I fell in love with Belinda Carlisle in the back of a clunky brown passenger van in the summer of 1987, my walkman spinning the cassette of her debut solo album, “Belinda.” On the cover, the most beautiful woman in the world was dressed in all black against a Hubba Bubba pink backdrop, her bob flung whimsically in a way [...]

Do you have that friend in your life who, depending on the day and your mood, you are either madly in love with or so annoyed by you want to shove him in front of a bus? After reading Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, I’m pretty convinced that if Steve Almond were my friend, he’d be that friend. [...]

I wanted to read American Widow by Alissa Torres ever since I spied it on Largehearted Boy’s list of favorite graphic novels of 2008. When it arrived in a big box of books David sent me I was giddy. I was intrigued for years by the bare bones of the story — young woman loses husband on 9-11 while seven [...]

Laurie Lindeen (who answered MN Reads 6 questions last year) sets us up for a solid rock-n-roll road-trip in Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story. With its sassy pink cover, this memoir will do its best to surprise you with brutal honesty and boundless energy. Lindeen and her band, Zuzu’s Petals, may not have it easy, but they [...]

Bonnie Rough expertly straddles the fine line of too much information in her new book Carrier, Untangling the Danger in my DNA. Reality and memoir fill in the pieces to Rough’s past as she writes about her genetic abnormality – an inherited DNA trait – that she could likely pass on to future children. “In the summer of 2004, before [...]

If you follow funny people on Twitter, you’re probably one of the more than 1.3 million people following @shitmydadsays. @shitmydadsays is exactly that – shit Justin Halpern’s dad says. Justin Halpern, a broke twenty-nine-year-old aspiring screenwriter, had to move back in with his mom and dad, and to capture the insightful nuggets of information from his retired seventy-four-year-old father, Sam [...]

Attention pervos: If you are looking for a free photograph of a penis wearing a hair clip, just find a dark corner of your local (preferably indie) bookstore, and flip to page 209 of Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee. That’s where you’ll find the shot of a chunky decorative unit resting on a bed of [...]

“It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.” That’s a line Rob Hudson (John Cusack) says in the movie “High Fidelity” and it’s exactly how I feel about Craig Thompson’s “illustrated novel” (his words) Blankets. Why yes, I did just quote a movie based [...]

Terry Gross is the voice in my head who indirectly tells me what to do. And this time, the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air” introduced me to a young former dominatrix who practiced her craft while juggling heroin and a 3.9 GPA in college — and then wrote about it in the memoir Whip Smart by Melissa Febos. This is [...]

I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was lying in bed in a pair of baggy wide-legged olive green sweatpants, a stained white tank top, and for some reason a bra. A bra?! To bed?! I was just too lazy to remove it. And then, on page 69 of Kevin Sampsell’s memoir A Common Pornography, I realized that [...]